


Yield

by Zethsaire



Series: Genderqueer [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Character Study, Coping, Deaf Clint Barton, Domestic, Gen, Genderfluid Character, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Slice of Life, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 20:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4760693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zethsaire/pseuds/Zethsaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Throughout their life, they have been many different things and many different people. It's taken them this long to realize that's not a bad thing.</p><p>(Also known as Steve is the most supportive friend ever.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yield

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyByakko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyByakko/gifts).



> I was fortunate enough to be able to pinch-hit this fic! I'm so glad I got to write it, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!
> 
> Note on pronouns: I used whatever pronouns Bucky was feeling for each section of the fic. I tried to make it clear when and why, but if anything is too confusing, let me know!

Bucky still can't believe how cool Steve is about – everything. Straight allies have nothing on Steve Rogers. Finds out Bucky prefers men? Reads every book on the subject, and then proceeds to tell Bucky he loves him and hopes he doesn't mind being Steve's brother and friend still. Steve doesn't care if Bucky checks him out, and he starts pointing out attractive men that Bucky might like.

They spend every Saturday together watching ridiculous romantic movies and rating the male actors for attractiveness. Steve is straight and asexual, but he is an artist, and he has excellent taste. He seems to know what Bucky likes more than Bucky does because for him, it's all about aesthetics, what people are pleasing. Sex is so far removed from the picture that he can focus on other things. And he is an excellent wing man.

And when Bucky finally figured out they were genderfluid, and that body dysphoria had been part of the trauma of their recovery process, Steve takes it in stride. He helps Bucky pick a name for female days – Jamie – and always, _always_ gets her pronouns right, and helps her come up with a system to show gender without saying it every time.

Steve buys her a white gold wrist band for her female days, and buys him a black titanium band for male days, and gets them a shiny silver band for every other day. He's so supportive sometimes Bucky just can't breathe, but it's good – so good.

Steve helps her shop for clothes, helps her find bras and cute tops and matching shoes, ruffled skirts and matching accessories. He helps her try on all the different types of padding she needs to really round out her curves, and tightens her corsets – a job that is literally _impossible_ alone.

Steve goes and gets a mani-pedi with her on one of her most feminine days. The manicurists are so excited to be doing Steve Roger's nails that they don't even comment on the fact that Jamie doesn't exactly pass well. Even with everything her jaw is too strong, her adam's apple too prominent, her shoulders too wide. Not to mention the metal arm. But Steve doesn't care. She's just Bucky (and sometimes Jamie); his friend, no matter what.

But Steve is perhaps, at his most supportive when Bucky gets up the nerve to tell him that he really, really likes Clint. Clint is often quiet right up until he delivers a sarcastic one-liner that sets all the other Avengers to laughing. He doesn't really speak much, but he always smiles with his eyes, even at Bucky. He perches up high, feels comfortable when he's removed from everyone else, yet is comfortable sharing his space with Bucky, who is also at ease in high, isolated spaces. They share a mutual affection of long distance marksmanship, and once Bucky is cleared for the use of the weapons range, they have many good natured competitions. Bucky even surprises him by being decent with a bow, though he can only really compete with Hawkeye when using his favorite sniper rifle.

Steve is the one who encourages Bucky to ask Clint out. He helps Bucky learn sign language; well, it's really more remembering it, and learning the specific dialect that Clint uses, because Bucky has vague memories of speaking to Steve with his hands behind a teacher's back, in subway tunnels or at home, everywhere Steve wouldn't get in trouble for signing instead of lip reading.

Clint lost his hearing later in life due to an explosion during a mission, instead of being born deaf in one ear like Steve, but Bucky's gesture of speaking sign with him goes a long way. When Bucky eventually asks Clint out on a date – a real date, not the coffee and terrible television almost sort of dates they've been having for months – it's with sign language. When Clint gives him a smile – a real, big smile with all his teeth showing – in response, Bucky knows they've finally done something right.

Bucky has always been different things for different people. Back in the forties, they didn't know they were gender-fluid. They didn't even know that was a _thing_. They hadn't even really acknowledged that part of them that preferred men. It just wasn't done. They couldn't bring Steve down to that level, he got picked on enough as it was. So Bucky had been the upstanding citizen; the straight man, always with a woman on his arm, always ready to smile and dance and conform to every aspect of the masculine ideal.

Except for some nights, no more than every six months or so, when he couldn't stand stuffing that part of himself down any more and he'd go to the gay clubs that everyone knew about but no one talked about, and he'd drink and dance and fumble under clothes except instead of a gal in his arms it was a fella, and he felt so guilty afterwords he was almost sick with it, but while it was happening he couldn't be more happy.

Then he went to war, and he was a soldier. Everything he thought he knew about being a man was stripped away, and they stuffed a soldier into its place. They taught him how to fight, how to resist torture, how to serve his country before anyone else. They taught him to kill. And Bucky let them, because he'd been drafted and there wasn't anything else he could do, because at least this way he could send Steve home money. Steve, who was safe at home, far, far away from the turmoil and chaos of war.

Until he wasn't, and he was some kind of super soldier, standing over Bucky as he repeated his service number over and over, just like he'd been taught. Only, it hadn't made it hurt any less, and it hadn't kept them from doing he still wasn't sure what to him. They hadn't been interested in information anyways, just his body, and they'd taken that apart and put it back together over and over again until Bucky really wasn't sure that was actually Steve, standing over him, except who else would be that damn stupid?

Then he was a sniper, fighting for Steve instead of his country, keeping himself together with sheer willpower because Steve needed him to be sane, Steve needed him to watch his fool back, because no one else could keep up with him. He ignored all the new things about his body; the fact that he could see further than he'd been able to before, hear things he hadn't been able to before, able to function on less sleep and was less fatigued than the others even when they'd trudged through miles and miles of snow and rough terrain. Ignored how hot he ran now – almost as hot as Steve.

He dreamed of being back there, on the table, Zola standing over him with that almost innocent smile, hiding the devil within. Dreamed of it almost every night, waking up just in time to stop himself from crying out, from letting Steve know that he really wasn't okay. And then he was falling from the train, and he was there again, impossibly there, on the table. Zola was _there_ and that didn't make sense because even if Steve wasn't coming for him (Steve was dead, he'd seen the photos, he'd heard the broadcasts,) Steve had finished his mission. He'd saved the world. So why was Zola there? It just didn't make sense.

And then they put him in the machine, and nothing made sense any more. All sense was removed, was scrubbed away.

He was a tool.

He was HYDRA. He was going to change the world. He was a protector, he saved people from themselves, he took up Steve's mantle as much as he could, shouldering the world's burdens. When people tried to destroy the vision, he removed them. When the world strayed from the course, he was the bullet that put destiny back on its proper path.

He was a brainwashed doll.

It all seemed so clear on this side of the glass. After the psychics and the deprogrammers and the therapists. HYDRA had taken everything good about him and twisted it for evil. And even now, Bucky wasn't sure exactly how far they'd had to twist him. Maybe he'd just been rotten before, the sweet Steve-focused coating just part of the lie, and HYDRA had exposed the truth within. Maybe he really was a monster.

James (Jamie) “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes is a person. They aren't always a very good person, but they do their best. They have friends, and the best friggin' boyfriend in the world, and a support structure. They have therapists and doctors they actually trust, even if they don't always like them very much. They have people who care about them for _them_ , not for anyone else.

It has taken a long time, but they've finally realized sometime between the therapy appointments and the manicures and the dates at the local frozen yogurt shop that they don't have to change themselves any more. They don't have to try to conform to some kind of standard measure. They can just be themself.

And it's the best feeling in the entire world.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments give me life!!


End file.
